Orienting Istanbul: Cultural Capital of Europe?

              © PASOS. Revista de Turismo y Patrimonio Cultural. ISSN 1695-7121
Vol. 10 Nº 2. Special Issue. Pp. 95-97. 2012
www.pasosonline.org
cenk.ozbay@boun.edu.tr
Reseñas de publicaciones
Orienting Istanbul: Cultural Capital of Europe?
Edited by Deniz Göktürk, Levent Soysal and Ipek Türeli, London: Routledge: 2010.
ISBN: 978-0-415-58011-3
Cenk Özbay
Recently, the city of Istanbul has be-come
the subject, the pivot of the narra-tive,
or the constitutive setting for many
books, in Turkish or in English, fi ction or
social science, monographs or edited vol-umes
(Eckard, 2008; Guvenc, 2009; Key-der,
1999; Keyder 2010; Magden 2005;
Mills 2010; Navaro-Yashin, 2002; Pamuk,
2006; Perouse, 2011; Safak, 2000; Stokes,
2010; Tugal, 2009; Yardimci, 2005). In
these works, Istanbul has been repre-sented
as the unique showcase of the con-temporary
Turkish culture: Cosmopolitan,
multilayered, commercialized, privatized,
ambiguous, perplexing, incoherent, dan-gerous,
segregated, and full of intricate
relations that urban citizens have to navi-gate
through. Culture has long been a prob-lematical
term for social scientists, as the
city for urban analysts, and Istanbul for
all those who have endeavored to under-stand
and interpret Turkey. Thus, a single
volume that brings together the different
aspects of “cultural life in Istanbul” in a
multidimensional and interdisciplinary
manner was both an obvious need and an
ambitious task. Orienting Istanbul claims
to satisfy this need with its all-embracing
content and opportune timing, when Istan-bul
was endorsed as one of the three Euro-pean
cultural capitals of the year 2010.
The book consists of fi ve sections with
an introduction and an epilogue. The three
editors present the rationale and the road-map
of the book in the comprehensive in-troductory
chapter. Istanbul has recently
gained a global visibility among the art
circles mainly because of novels and the
(urban) memoir of the Nobel prized author
Orhan Pamuk and fi lms of Nuri Bilge Cey-lan,
who won two Cannes Film Festival
awards in 2008 and 2011, and Fatih Akin,
a Hamburg based Turkish director, who
won a Golden Bear award at Berlin Film
Festival in 2004. Based on these and other
successful stories of urban cultural renew-al,
Orienting Istanbul is presented as “the
fi rst book to capture Istanbul’s rise to the
world stage set by post-industrial capital-ism.
It offers new insights into the re-pre-sentation
of Istanbul as a city of culture,
96
PASOS. Revista de Turismo y Patrimonio Cultural, 10(2). Special Issue. 2012
Orienting Istanbul: Cultural Capital of Europe?
ISSN 1695-7121
history, and diversity” (pp. 3-4). As an inevitable
part of the logic behind the book, this rising cultural
city phenomenon is explicated with the process of
Turkey’s integration to the European Union, or “Eu-ropean
Culture”, if there is one. As parallel to the
contested history of the recent Europeanization of
Istanbul, the editors in the introduction also high-light
the imperial city and its remnants in contem-porary
Istanbul, (for example ways of remembering
the Ottoman capital), as well as the transforma-tions
the city passed through in the last century un-der
the authority of the nation-state. Istanbul’s last
wave of urban transformation has been experienced
since the early 1980s as the city has gradually be-come
more open to globalization and neoliberaliza-tion
policies. In this process, Istanbul has deindus-trialized
to a large extent and ‘the culture industry’
in addition to fi nance and service sectors has risen
despite the fact that Turkey in general, and the ur-ban
economy of Istanbul in particular, are still sig-nifi
cantly behind Europe in terms of generating em-ployment
in and revenues from cultural industries.
The fi rst section of the book includes two chap-ters.
The most renowned scholar who writes about
Istanbul, Caglar Keyder, provides a critical intro-duction
to the debates around globalization and land
use in Istanbul. In the next chapter, Engin Isın, as
a result of his observations in various city-scapes,
advocates that Istanbul should not only be seen as
a city of melancholia and sadness but also as a com-munal
space of joy and pleasure. The Second section
of the book starts with a sociological study by Tuna
Kuyucu and Ozlem Unsal on spatial transforma-tions,
housing policies, gentrifi cation and the role of
the state and local government in the re-making of
the city. The following chapter focuses on Eminönü
district, which is the historical core of the city with
a rather contradictory industrial past, and ‘han’ as
a specifi c Ottoman setting, redefi ned and reordered
as ‘cultural heritage’ today. Chapter fi ve by Jeremy
Walton presents the author’s outsider perspectives
on the debate of the Islamic city and reconfi guring
Islamic parts of the town. The last chapter of this
section introduces “MiniaTurk”—a miniature park
space constructed and managed by the Istanbul
metropolitan municipality full with model buildings
and structures that represent and mediate mate-rial
as well as symbolic boundaries of the Turkish
nation-state.
The third section is devoted to examine cinemat-ic
works from and about Istanbul. The fi rst chap-ter
of this part, by Nezih Erdogan, takes a closer
look at how the art of cinema played tangible and
intangible roles in the linkage between modernity
and the city. The next chapter animates a migrants’
viewpoint of Istanbul through two fi lms from 1960s
and 2000s. Deniz Bayraktar and Elif Akcali in chap-ter
nine analyze the aerial fi lming of the city in the
movie Magic Carpet Ride as a departure point to
understand the intricate webs of relations that
both the fi lm uses as its subject matter and the city
contributes as its social thread. In the last chapter
of this part, Deniz Gokturk concentrates on Fatih
Akin’is recent documentary on Istanbul’s diverse
musical culture and uses the metaphor of ‘bridge’ as
a projection for the de-territorialized spectatorship
of the new, digital era. The fourth section of the book
focuses another setting in which arts and the city
relate, the Istanbul Biennial, with an interview and
two essays. The curator of the Tenth Istanbul Bien-nial
Hou Hanru is interviewed for the book and this
conversation is complemented with the seasoned art
scholar and practicing artist Jale Erzen’s medita-tions
on Istanbul’s time travel in terms of art scene
and yet another chapter that compares Istanbul Bi-ennial
with Berlin Biennial and the two different
urban cultural milieus that art is positioned.
The last part of the book concerns Turkey’s
serpentine Europeanization processes and Istan-bul’s
naming as one of the three European cultural
capitals of the year 2010. The section opens with a
discussion about the European Capital of Culture
Programme by Carola Hein and continues with a
report about Istanbul’s temporary cultural capi-tal
status by Oguz Oner, who is a specialist at the
Programme’s Istanbul agency. On her part, Marcy
Brink-Danan portrays Istanbul’s Jewish population
and their participation to urban culture as a signifi -
cant register to ongoing debates on cosmopolitan-ism.
The last chapter of this section paves the way
for rethinking Istanbul, its alternative futures and
Europe from the point of civilization, modernity and
culture. The anthropologist Michael Herzfeld cre-atively
concludes the book in the epilogue while he
simultaneously furthers the discussion on culture,
modernity, the past and the city while he kaleido-scopically
weaves the further points of analysis that
this volume can make sense in other geographies in
the epilogue.
Orienting Istanbul could be read as a response
by scholars from diverse backgrounds to the deep
transmogrifi cation that Istanbul has experienced in
the last quarter century. The three major intercon-nected
processes—neoliberalization, deindustrial-
Cenk Özbay
ISSN 1695-7121
97
PASOS. Revista de Turismo y Patrimonio Cultural, 10(2). Special Issue. 2012
ization and globalization, re-formed and re-shaped
the city-spaces in both economic and spatial lev-els.
This book takes the culture industries and the
art scene as a departure point to decode what has
happened in Istanbul. This constitutive preference
about the architecture of the book is buttressed by
a number of more social scientifi c approaches that
provide a miscellaneous background for the debates
about the role of the players of the arts and culture
circles. One dimension that might be criticized about
this architectural preference to talk about arts and
culture is the relative silence (except Chapter 3) on
Istanbulites’ interpretations and reactions against
this massive change. This book informs us about the
new Istanbul and its urban economy that is based
on culture, heritage, arts, and creative industries
but our curiosity on how this novelty is read, partici-pated,
incorporated, resisted or denied by millions
of Istanbulites continues unsatisfi ed.
Finally, I want to mention the urban tourism
aspect that Orienting Istanbul is indeed deeply re-lated
with but on the surface it seems like a margin-alized
concern. Despite the fact that the book starts
with recounting Istanbul’s 19th position at the New
York Times’ ranking of “The 31 Places to Go in 2010”
in the very fi rst page (and this information is reiter-ated
in the book) the phrases “tourism” and “Istan-bul
as a tourist destination” passes only a few times
throughout the book. I tend to deem the develop-ment
of the tourist city and the rapid increase in the
power and effectiveness of culture industries and art
scenes are both reciprocal and symbiotic processes.
In this sense, Istanbul is not an industrial center
any more, even at the national scale, it is not a fi -
nancial center yet (maybe it will never be) and it is
not possible to represent it as a “global city” through
the multiscalar networks, fl ows and mobilities it is
meant to have. In this urban context, Istanbul rises
(or, “is discovered” by the Westerners) simultane-ously
as a tourist city, as its historical counterpart
Rome, and as a hip urban venue of arts and culture,
maybe as Berlin or Venice. Orienting Istanbul opens
a crucial door in our comprehension of the dynamics
that govern the rapidly evolving city (which is in a
“frenetic transformation” as Herzfeld puts it, p. 313)
but it also highlights the obvious need for different
studies and research agendas to further contribute
our critical knowledge on Istanbul’s potential as a
tourist destination and its multiple meanings at a
palette including cosmopolitanism, creativity, and
fl exible boundaries of the city, the nation and the
world. Recibido: 15/02/2011
Aceptado: 31/10/2011
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